by Scott Farris
Any sense that Jack felt unloved as a child was most certainly exacerbated by his parents’ obvious preference for his older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. As historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has noted, Joe Junior appeared to be “a child gifted by the gods . . . strong and glowingly handsome with his dark-blue eyes and his sturdy frame filled with vitality, health, and energy. . . . At the sheer sound of his voice calling or talking, the faces of both Rose and Joe Senior would break into radiant smiles.” Jack’s most beloved sibling, his sister Kathleen, who would die in a plane crash at age twenty-eight, said it was considered “heresy” within the family if anyone suggested Jack might be superior to Joe Junior in some way.
Anyone viewing Jack and Joe Junior side by side could understand why the notion Jack could do anything better than his older brother seemed far-fetched. In contrast to his elder brother, Jack was small for his age and unusually sickly throughout his childhood, facts Joe Junior, generally gentle with his other siblings, seemed to delight in exposing. Joe reveled in picking on the brother who was less than two years his junior.* In football, for example, Joe might lob the ball gently to his other brothers and sisters, but with Jack “he would often find an excuse to slam the ball into his stomach and walk away laughing as his younger brother lay doubled up in pain.” Another time, the two brothers raced their bicycles around the block, headed in opposite directions. As they came around the final curves heading directly at each other, neither veered away. In the collision, Joe walked away unhurt; Jack required twenty-eight stitches. It was understandable, then, that Jack took some delight to learn that when Joe Junior had arrived at Choate boarding school, he was paddled by upperclassmen for supposed insubordination. “Oh Man he was all blisters,” Jack wrote a friend, adding that he wished he could have added his own swats. “ . . . What I wouldn’t have given to be a sixth former.”
* Joe Junior also occasionally bullied the younger children too. After his death during World War II, as the family put together a set of privately published remembrances, the youngest child, Ted, wrote that when he was about the age of six Joe Junior threw him off a sailboat and into the cold ocean water when he failed to understand and execute a sailing command. Joe Junior eventually pulled him from the water, but Teddy said the incident showed that Joe Junior “got very easily mad.” Jack put Teddy’s essay in the book of remembrances, saying if that was how he remembered Joe, then it should be in the book.
“He had a pugnacious personality,” Jack said of his brother. “Later on it smoothed out, but it was a problem in my boyhood.” A woman who dated Jack said, “He talked about him all the time. ‘Joe plays football better, Joe dances better, Joe is getting better grades.’ Joe just kind of overshadowed him in everything.” Jack’s acceptance of his inferior status was evident in his schoolwork. When he and Joe attended the same schools, Jack’s grades were poor. When they were separated, the quality of Jack’s work noticeably improved. Still, Jack insisted that he admired Joe and that there was no one else he would “rather have spent an evening or played golf or in fact done anything [with].”
Rose philosophically viewed the rivalry between her two eldest sons as “inevitable,” and defended the favoritism shown Joe Junior as a deliberate parenting strategy. “If you bring up the eldest son right, the way you want the others to go, that is very important because the younger ones watch him,” she said. After his elder brother was killed during the war, Jack put together a set of testimonials to his brother, titled As We Remember Joe, which he had privately printed. In his own essay, Jack wrote, “I think if the Kennedy children amount to anything now, or ever amount to anything, it will be due more to Joe’s behavior and his constant example than to any other factor.”
When Joseph Junior was born, his proud grandfather Fitzgerald predicted to local reporters, “He is going to be President of the United States.” That had certainly been the family plan until Joe was killed, passing that burden on to Jack. But Joe Junior’s death left emotional and psychological burdens too. Jack had defined himself by his competition with his brother. In the few years before Joe Junior’s death, Jack had begun to get the upper hand in that competition as a published author and war hero. With Joe now dead, Jack would forever be denied the chance to prove himself the better man, the better son. Joe’s death forever sealed his superiority in the eyes of his father and his mother. “I’m shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win,” Jack told Billings.
Ronald Reagan, too, had a domineering older brother with whom he had a relationship just as competitive, but slightly less combative than that of the Kennedy brothers. The relationship was less traumatic for Reagan because he and his brother lived to old age and were able to reconcile their competition in ways that Joe Junior’s death had denied Kennedy. Reagan also had another comfort Kennedy lacked; Joe and Rose Kennedy were united in their shared favoritism toward Joe Junior, but Jack and Nelle Reagan were split in their allegiances between their two sons.
Reagan’s older (by two and a half years) brother, John Neil Reagan, freely acknowledged that he was “the son of my father, while Dutch was always Nelle’s boy.” Jack Reagan’s nickname for Ronald—Dutch—came about because, Jack said, he looked like “a fat little Dutchman.” Neil, meanwhile, had been labeled “Moon” because he had, as an infant, a round face like the comics character Moon Mullins. Reagan biographer Garry Wills has said of the Reagan boys, “Brothers never sorted themselves out more symmetrically in their allegiances or antipathies.”
Like Joseph Kennedy Jr., Moon was not only older, but he was also “bigger and stronger than his younger brother.” He sang in a beautiful tenor like his father, and was a graceful dancer like his mother. Most distressing of all, Moon achieved the athletic success that eluded his little brother. During Moon’s senior year at Dixon High School, he was the football team’s star end on a squad that went undefeated; two years later, when Dutch finally made varsity and played as an undersized tackle and end, the team went a disappointing 2–7. Athletic success came so easily to Moon that he never appreciated it, getting tossed from the team for smoking cigarettes.
Moon was also bolder than his little brother and prone to mischief. For a time, Moon’s best friend was an African American, and he would sit with his friend in the balcony reserved for blacks in Dixon’s segregated movie theater. Dixon High School had two campuses. Moon attended the rougher Southside campus, where the favored teen hangout was a pool hall; Dutch attended the Northside campus, where the favored hangout was an ice-cream parlor. In one of the more elaborate pranks orchestrated by Moon, a manure spreader was disassembled and then reassembled on the roof of the school. Some believed Moon had “a streak of meanness,” and he had the ability to “bring Dutch to tears” with his needling—even well into adulthood.
While not as combative as the Kennedy brothers, the Reagan boys were so opposite in character that “it’s not at all clear that . . . [they] were especially friendly,” and they had trouble hiding some mutual disdain even as adults. In the memoir he wrote just before running for governor of California, Dutch noted, for example, that he had been surprised when Moon ended up joining him in attending little Eureka College. “I could see him at some large university where a speakeasy wasn’t out of reach, but not in the mellow, small-town, ivy-covered atmosphere of Eureka, where not too many years before dancing had been prohibited on the campus.” He said he was also disturbed to discover that Eureka had provided Moon with a tuition loan, recalling that Moon had “never paid me back any small loan in his life, and I didn’t like to think he might treat Eureka the same way.” If Moon mortified Reagan, it was because at Eureka, just as at Dixon, Moon outshined Reagan in football.
Still, when Reagan began his career as a radio broadcaster, he sent Moon ten dollars a week to help pay for his education, and when Moon came to visit Reagan at the radio station where he worked, Reagan helped arrange a tryout that led to Moon getting a job at the station too. It turned out
that Moon was a natural for advertising, so when Reagan went to Hollywood, Moon followed him and eventually became a vice president at a leading California advertising agency. Moon angrily resented insinuations that he owed his career to his younger brother. “Ronald ran on my coattails for years,” he said. “It’s about time he reciprocated.”
Some observers thought that Moon was so jealous of Dutch’s rise to prominence that he “wasn’t wholeheartedly on his side” and secretly tried to undermine him even as his advertising firm worked on Reagan’s 1966 California gubernatorial race. But when Reagan became president, Moon kept out of the spotlight and ignited no controversies during his brother’s time in office. Mindful of the problems President Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy, had caused in trying to cash in on his then-famous name, Neil told reporters who asked, “No, there isn’t to be any ‘Moonie beer.’”
The person always on Reagan’s side, at least before wife Nancy came along, was his mother, Nelle. Reagan said he learned from his father “the value of hard work and ambition, and maybe a little something about telling a story.” From his mother, he said, “I learned the value of prayer, how to have dreams, and believe I could make them come true.”
Like her future husband, Nelle grew up on a farm but had no greater love of farm life than Jack Reagan had. While details are sketchy, she seems to have worked as a clerk in a store, which is where she likely met Jack, but she exuded an air of sophistication. She was known as a “smart” dresser and enjoyed writing poetry. Her given name was “Nellie,” but she changed the spelling to “Nelle” because, friends said, it seemed more artistic. She was an accomplished performer in amateur theatricals, often with Jack as her costar. A Tampico, Illinois, version of Broadway’s husband-and-wife team of Lunt and Fontaine, Jack and Nelle performed in three productions together in 1913 alone, and a notice in a local newspaper said, in somewhat garbled syntax, that the pair’s performance was so mesmerizing that “a pin dropped could not be heard in the entire house.” That Jack and Nelle were different from their neighbors is also demonstrated by their agreement to a request first made by Neil that their sons could address them by their first names.
Nelle’s religious heritage was Presbyterian, and she was known to occasionally attend Methodist services as a girl, but for most of her early life she does not appear to have been devoutly religious. Given that she was an excellent dancer and married Jack in a Catholic ceremony in 1904, we at least can say it was unlikely she was raised in a fundamentalist household. She had also allowed Neil to be baptized into the Catholic faith. However, in 1910, during a time when religious revivals were sweeping central Illinois, Nelle was baptized by full immersion into the Disciples of Christ Church, and she raised her second son, Ronald, in that church. Indeed, she became a “pillar” of her local church, often with the help of her younger son, teaching Sunday School, distributing religious tracts in jails, and putting on self-authored morality plays for the congregation.
Some of those morality plays lamented how alcohol could ruin lives, for Nelle had become deeply concerned about Jack’s problem with strong drink. Nelle “hated liquor,” a friend said, and Nelle became active in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She wrote a temperance play for her church that included the line, perhaps delivered by young Dutch, “I love you, Daddy, except when you have that old bottle.” Nelle seems to have also developed some antipathy for the Catholic Church, believing Catholic tolerance of alcohol was a factor in her husband’s drinking problem.
The degree to which Jack Reagan was a true alcoholic is still debated within the Reagan family. Nelle and Dutch believed he was. “Sometimes, my father simply disappeared and didn’t come home for days, and sometimes when he did return, my brother and I would hear some pretty fiery arguments,” Reagan said. And Reagan continued to worry about his father’s “curse” well into adulthood, noting in his memoirs that he was particularly worried that his father would get drunk while attending the premier at the University of Notre Dame of his 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American. The fact that Reagan would be particularly concerned that his father would be drunk in a Catholic place has led his biographer Garry Wills to conclude that Reagan joined Nelle, his tee-totaling Protestant mother, in believing his father’s drinking was tied to his Catholic faith.
But Dutch’s own younger son, Ron, questions whether his grandfather Jack was “a true alcoholic” because “he could drink and stop himself before becoming completely drunk, and even my father acknowledged that Jack would sometimes go ‘for a couple of years without a drop.’” In Ron Reagan’s view, Jack should be a more sympathetic figure, for considering where he started, he did not do too badly in life. Given that he acknowledged his father was not abusive, why Dutch dwells on his father’s frailties in both of his published memoirs is a bit of a mystery. Ron Reagan believes that Dutch found his father “a sad and troubling disappointment,” but “perhaps most unforgivable, in Dad’s reckoning, was the fact that his father was a man who made life much harder than it needed to be for the long-suffering Nelle.”
Despite his good looks and charm, there is only one time it was suspected that Jack Reagan had an affair, though the woman involved may actually have been a prostitute whom Jack patronized while he was living apart from his family for a brief time when working in Springfield during the 1920s. Still, it was during this time that there was talk that the Reagans might divorce. There is the odd coincidence that the Reagans, like the Kennedys, may have ceased conjugal relations relatively early in their marriage, adding tension to each relationship. After Ronald Reagan’s birth, his mother was advised not to have any more children. “Given the state of contraception in those days—not to mention Nelle’s extreme modesty (she used to disrobe only after shutting herself in a closet)—it’s possible that by the time they reached their late twenties, Jack and Nelle’s sex life had effectively come to end,” Ron Reagan claims.
Whether this is true can never be known, of course, and whether this contributed to Jack’s drinking problem is simply more speculation. What is known is that it was in the years just after Dutch’s birth that Jack’s drinking became a public as well as a private problem. While living in Tampico, where Dutch was born, Jack had become a pillar of the community, serving as a city councilman, assistant fire chief, finance chairman at St. Mary’s Parish, and a Knight of Columbus. But just as Joe Kennedy moved from Boston to New York to pursue his larger business plans, Jack Reagan found Tampico too small to match the size of his ambitions. So Jack and his family moved to Chicago in 1915, when Dutch was four years old—but they felt obliged to leave the city after only ten months when Jack was arrested for public drunkenness.
Instead of moving up in the big city, the Reagans moved back downstate and continued to move from town to town and from one rental property to another.
All told, the Reagans lived in thirteen different apartments or rental homes in five different cities and towns. “As a consequence of his nomadic boyhood, Ronald formed few friendships,” biographer Lou Cannon noted. The white frame, two-story house on Hennepin Avenue, where the Reagans lived for several years in Dixon, has been turned into a small museum to honor the fortieth president, but Garry Wills is probably correct that the truth is that Reagan “had no boyhood home,” a judgment with which Neil Reagan agreed.
To a large degree, the same was true for John Kennedy. He had been born in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, where he attended several lower schools, then moved to New York City, first in Riverdale and then in Bronxville, while his family also had a summer home in Hyannis Port in Massachusetts and a winter home in Palm Beach, Florida. Kennedy was first sent to the Canterbury prep school in Connecticut at age thirteen, but he withdrew to recover at home from an appendectomy. When he was ready to return to school, this time he was sent to Choate, also in Connecticut.
When he would come home for visits, he did not have a room of his own waiting for him. Instead, he would ask as he arrived
at one of the several mansions his father owned, “Which room do I have this time?” A young woman who went to Hyannis Port with Kennedy while the rest of the family was in Palm Springs recalled that she was “surprised to see him go through the empty house like an intruder, peeking into his father’s room and looking in his dresser draw[er]s and picking up objects on all the surfaces as if he hadn’t seen them before.” A friend visiting one Kennedy home said it was “creepy. It wasn’t homey.” And yet another friend recalled of Jack and the other Kennedy children, “They really didn’t have a real home with their own rooms where they had pictures on the walls or memorabilia on the shelves but would rather come home for holidays from their boarding schools and find whatever room was available.”
To a large degree, politics is the art of the politician making a superficial connection with a stranger seem like a meaningful experience for them both. Immediate intimacy seems an oxymoron, but that is what the best politicians achieve. Kennedy and Reagan were both extraordinary at it. This gift is usually credited to an ineffable charisma possessed by each man, when it may simply have been a skill learned early in life by two essentially reserved, often lonely young boys who were always in the position of having to make new friends and adapt to new situations. They had learned how to approach someone they did not know and how to make themselves approachable to others with a smile, a gesture, a gentle touch, or a bawdy quip. In short, their rootless childhoods were giving Kennedy and Reagan the skills to succeed in politics—though no one who knew them as children imagined either would pursue that path as adults.